Every human's mental model of "how the world works" is built from accumulated experience. Experiences arise when our novel genetic inclinations interact with the novel environment we are born into. For me, from as far back as I can remember, I was acutely inclined to attend to questions of truth, meaning and identity. Doubtless, this trait was amplified by my environment, as my family converted from Catholic to Mennonite to Pentecostal to cult-ish, all before I finished high school. Shortly after graduating I was excommunicated from that last group and, by extension, from my family.

The mental whiplash was intense. From my vantage point, each system of belief appeared to declare its own "absolute truth" that condemned all others. Faced with the prospect of eternal consequences for subtle distinctions in doctrine, my mind often simply went blank, sometimes for hours or days at a time. Thankfully, the impulse to make meaning was persistent, clawing awareness back to the surface time and again.

Wrestling with these contradictions throughout college, I eventually shifted from seeking an authoritative leader who could tell me definitively what to think, to the conviction that I must personally shoulder the responsibility for making judgment calls about what I would believe, and why. Thus began a lifelong quest to gather sufficient understanding and wisdom upon which to base decisions in life, from the mundane to the profound. Convenient, comfortable explanations were not compelling. What I craved was seeing reality as directly and clearly as possible, however inconvenient it may be.

Bits of my quest took me down various roads: being a long-haul truck driver after college; returning to college for my teaching certificate; becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer to a remote town in Kazakhstan; then staying in-country to work for a USAID contractor. Each of these experiences exposed me to new apparent contradictions in beliefs across cultural and socioeconomic groups, which fueled my continued exploration.

One byproduct of this exploration was that I began to accumulate a peculiar amalgam of traits drawn from rural, small town, and urban; white collar and blue collar; US and post-Soviet; Mennonite and mainstream American. My struggle to integrate these made it hard for me to move beyond peripheral participation in any one group, resulting in a sense of isolation that drove me to redouble my efforts to confront questions of meaning and identity.

During this quest I met and married someone with a similar set of inputs (rural, small-town and urban; post-Soviet and American), but who started in the opposite culture (Kazakh), and had an entirely different style of coping. While I wrestled between freezing and intensely analyzing, my wife's default was, and is, to be quietly intuitive. I remain grateful for her intuition, warmth and kindness, as well as her recognizing that wrestling and analysis, too, have their time and place.

Moving back to the US for graduate school was the next big life transition. Some part of me hoped that I might finally find a system of meaning-making that clicked. Instead, I found textbooks full of competing psychological theories. As genuinely valuable as my time in training was, none of the theoretical models resonated deeply. Each held nuggets of wisdom to be gleaned, but felt disconnected from a larger whole, lacking a compelling theoretical framework to organize around.

Since receiving my degree in 2006, my life has followed a more stereotypical progression: children born and sent to college; shifts from one job to another; thinning hair; mortgage payments; funerals. Through it all, the quest for snippets and scraps of wisdom remained. With each therapy model I studied in depth, I found some new gem to add to my collection, but never a single organizing framework.

In 2009 I stumbled into an opportunity to work exclusively with military couples, which I embraced with enthusiasm. Working for the military was yet another shift between cultures, by then a quite familiar process for me. And in working with couples I found the same kind of wrestling with existential crisis that was so personally familiar and rewarding. When we choose a life partner, our individual identity organizes extensively around our primary relationship. When that relationship is fractured, our entire identity is at stake, and often every available defense, elegant or not, is instinctively mobilized to protect against collapse. It is one thing to talk to an individual about this experience separate from their spouse. It is a whole different experience to be in the room while that sense of threat is activated, and competing perspectives are clashing in real time. Seeing couples together meant no easy way out, no cheap platitudes to rationalize one perspective at the expense of another. The quest for a narrative about reality that could genuinely contain both individuals' experiences without vilifying either one stayed in rigorous focus.

Slowly over the years of searching, compelling themes began to emerge, bits of wisdom fitting in with one another in patterns that repeated. In 2014 a colleague recommended The Mindful Way Through Depression for a client of mine. Ever the responsible clinician, I decided to evaluate it before sharing it. I read it through, then prepared to give the accompanying CD a "quick listen." It turns out that I deeply misunderstood what mindfulness meditation was! I had expected a placid assortment of "relaxation techniques." What the CD actually held was a collection of all the exercises required for a rigorous eight-week mindfulness meditation training program. Mindfulness meditation, it turns out, exercised a muscle that, for me, was undeveloped to the point of near total atrophy. Somewhat akin to a casual walker suddenly embarking on a marathon, in trying to do all the exercises in a single sitting, I nearly induced a panic attack.

But wait - if mindfulness isn't a collection of relaxation techniques... what is it? I found myself returning to the topic over and over whenever it came time to select continuing education trainings. By 2019 I was serious enough to enroll in one of those rigorous 8-week courses, and in 2025 I completed an intensive, year-long certificate course in integrating mindfulness and psychotherapy. Across ten years of exploring mindfulness, I began experiencing it as a tool I could use to knit together the other bits of wisdom I had been collecting along the way.

As I apply it, mindfulness meditation is a way to cultivate a particular kind of compassionate, attuned and brutally honest awareness. From that mindset I am willing to be wrong and willing to be right; most important is what is true under the unique set of conditions coalescing in that moment. Something that worked yesterday and for the past 20 years may need to be set aside today as the conditions around and within me change. Applied in this way, mindfulness meditation is a powerful tool for blending the intuitive and the analytical, harnessing them to work in unison, rather than choosing one at the expense of the other.

My explorations continue! I expect it will be appropriate from time to time for me to revisit this page to make additions and revisions. My best effort to date to represent how my experiences show up in my practice of therapy is on the home page, but if other questions arise, please do not hesitate to reach out.